Best Part:

Amazingly addictive gameplay, looks beautiful in VR

Worst Part:

Some cubes can be difficult to find which can lead to a small bit of frustration

Bottom Line

Qbeh take’s everything that made Portal’s puzzles great and mix’s it with elements of MineCraft and even Tetris and blends them all together to create something unique yet familiar. Its Rift implementation is the best we have seen yet from a previously released 2D game so much so that it’s hard to imagine that it was not originally designed with VR in mind.

Rating

Graphics

Sound

Controls

Gameplay

Comfort Level

Immersion

Total Score

4/
5

by David

Full Article

Qbeh 1 The Atlas Cube is an atmospheric 1st-person puzzle platformer by Developers Liquid Flower that takes players on a Journey through a variety of strange cube built worlds, each filled with new mysteries and secrets to uncover. In each world you will find special cubes that must be collected and used to navigate to the next portal.

Qbeh’s art style really set’s it apart as looking at these simple block worlds interspersed with trees and foliage really looks beautiful in the Rift. I know that most of you watching this video will make comparisons to MineCraft but the way the lighting effects have been rendered and the more subtle colour pallet of the cubes make Qbeh’s environment a more tranquil place to be. The size of each cube in the rift looks to be around 1 meter squared and when you progress further you will come across large towers and huge monolithic areas beckoning to be explored.

Qbeh’s game mechanic’s are so simple and pure that it makes this game one of the most addictive and enjoyable games I have ever played in VR or on standard 2D monitor for that matter. You collect cubes of different colours throughout the world with the most common being the Red cubes. The cubes you collect can only stick to yellow cubes which are embedded into the walls or cubes you have collected. This makes for some very interesting puzzle solving and this type of slower game play works fantastically well in Virtual Reality.

As you progress you will find other coloured cubes along your path which all do different tasks but can all be used to create bridges and steps to your next objective. The blue cubes are used as keys in the game and when you come across locked doorways you can stick the blue cubes to the red locked cubes and this will unlock your path forward. The blue cubes are also used to activate lifts in some areas making the puzzle’s more complex as you progress. Other cubes like the purple cube allow you to jump further and is a type of anti-gravity cube.

In Qbeh you can’t really die even if you fall through the world by missing a jump. The only consequence is that you will respawn next to the nearest totom poll of an owl which never puts you back more than twenty seconds of gameplay.

Qbeh if one of the very rare examples of a game converted for Virtual Reality done right. The developers have taken their time and made all the menus perfectly readable in the Rift and once you start to explore Qbeh’s world you can quite easily spend hours exploring the beautiful ruins without the need to take the Rift off. The only issue with this VR Implementation is when you select Rift Mode from the options menu the game will automatically set itself to the native resolution of the DK1 Rift which is 1200 by 800. There are no option to increase the resolution when playing in rift mode which would be nice as increasing the resolution in many Rift games even though the display is lower ress always seems to sharpen the visuals quite a bit however with that being said Obeh doesn’t suffer as much as other games as it’s world is mostly made up of 1 meter cubes.

Qbeh is unashamedly influenced by Portal 1 and as I explored through the levels I even came across a Portal cube with a love heart on it. I’m sure if I explored more I might even find some cake somewhere. Qbeh take’s everything that made Portal’s puzzles great and mix’s it with elements of MineCraft and even Tetris and blends them all together to create something unique yet familiar. Its Rift implementation is the best we have seen yet from a previously released 2D game so much so that it’s hard to imagine that it was not originally designed with VR in mind.

Qbeh is well worth your time and money as it’s a modern classic and a must play experience.

Comments

About the Author

David

David Whelan a professional web developer has been a serial early adopter of the latest technology. From an early age playing on a C64 he always dreamt of entering virtual worlds and exploring the endless possibilities that could be offered up by the platform.

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Here at Virtual Reality Reviewer we will bring you the latest news and reviews on Virtual Reality. We cover software and games for Virtual Reality devices such as the Oculus Rift and Playstation Virtual Reality headset Project Morpheus